What Do You Get When You Ask A Dirty Question?

"Somebody asked us the other day on a television program, 'Gee, you're such wholesome people, how could you go around asking people all these dirty questions?"' Anne Taylor Fleming, curled up snugly beside her husband Karl in the couch in their suite at the Ritz, raises herself up on her haunches, her deep-set cat's eyes flashing indignantly. "And I said to her, 'Is how you lost your virginity a dirty question?' I mean, it isn't."

The Flemings are very emphatic on that point, and sometimes they're careful to catch each other up on it. When Karl says jokingly that, now that The First Time is finished, they're "getting out of the sex business," his wife says quickly, "Well, we were never in the sex business." And when Karl continues to chuckle obliviously--"This for us, is the first time and the last time"--she repeats it, her voice rising: "Karl, we were never in the sex business." But even if you concede that point, the question remains: why did these two bright, talented, wholesome people travel around the country asking 28 different celebrities--ranging from Maya Angelou and Erica Jong to Dr. Spock and Mae West--how they lost their virginity?

One fairly obvious reason is that they were bright enough to realize that a book like this was bound to make money. At the time the idea came to them they were, as Anne says, "starving free-lancers" who were doing "you know, nice, normal pieces for The New York Times, Newsweek." And Anne is very matter-of-fact about why they chose to interview celebrities whose names would attract attention, rather than just the man on the street: "Very simple reason," she shrugs, "You gotta survive, when you're freelancing."

But Karl says there is more involved than the cash value of the names. "The fact of the matter is that since you know these people, you know their names, you can relate to their experiences. And the nice thing is that you can come out not feeling alone. Because somewhere in the experiences of these 28 people is your experience, or part of it, some piece of it, that you can recognize.

For Karl, who is about 20 years older than his wife, the reasons for writing the book seem to have been more complex. For one thing, he was not just any starving free-lancer. He'd been a journalist since 1948 and had worked for Newsweek for 11 years, eventually becoming Los Angeles bureau chief. As he says himself, he "had a front-row seat on some of the most fantastic things that have happened." When the civil rights battles were raging in Selma, Birmingham and Oxford, he was there. When Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Newsweek sent Fleming. When Nixon took his campaign on the road, Fleming went along.

So how did he end up asking Liberace how he lost his virginity? Apparently, that was not exactly what he had in mind when he left Newsweek to found his own weekly paper in Los Angeles--a paper that folded after only five months. "The paper was the first thing I'd failed at," Fleming says, his smooth, self-confident manners breaking momentarily. "Knocked me right on my ass--this being a society which doesn't look too kindly on failure."

Fleming looks successful, with his tanned face, prematurely grey hair and slight paunch--like a rising executive or liberal politician on the make. He seems to be the kind of man who prizes his independence--who would rather interview Mae West on his own than cover a presidential campaign for Newsweek--and he says he doesn't miss being in the thick of things. "Well, occasionally I feel a pang," he admits. "When I heard about Patty Hearst being busted, I thought, son of a bitch, I'd sure like to get my hands on her, you know, for four of five hours of tape. But in general I don't, because the way I want to do it now is that to do something I want to do, not something that necessarily falls within mainstream journalism, whatver that is."

The subject of The First Time was something that had been preying on his mind for a long time, he says, as a result of the puritanical atmosphere he grew up in, in a Methodist orphanage in North Carolina where he and the other children "had religion pumped into every orifice of our little helpless bodies, and of course everything about sex was verboten, it was dirty, it was sinful, it was guilt-ridden."

"When I went into this orphanage as a young boy," he says, "if a girl was caught even in the presence of a boy, she had her head shaved and was locked in a closet. Now that's literal fact. And as late as when I left there, in the mid-40s, if a boy and girl were caught together doing anything beyond hand-holding, they were both 'sent away' from this orphanage, the girls generally to whoever would take them and the boys were put into some kind of state reformatory.

"There was a fantastic fear and guilt attached to all that, and I don't think anybody who grows up in that kind of system escapes those scars, or can be rid of them very easily. It really took me a hell of a lot to shake off some of that stuff. I think for a large number of people in this book that was true--a large number of them have spent years and years and years trying to fight their way out from under all that crap that was laid on them when they were young."

So he wasn't too surprised by the serious, even solemn tone of most of the interviews. But Anne was surprised at "the guilt and the contortions" that came pouring out, and particularly surprised that they "were suffered equally by the men--the women had all the pressure not to do it, but the men had all the pressure to do it." And although obviously things have changed over the years and the chains of sexual repression have been loosened somewhat, Anne says she came to realize that things aren't as different now as they might seem.

"I think that one thing that's very interesting about young people is that as much as we've been exposed to sex, we've been exposed to a certain kind of sex, so-called liberated, gaudy, titillating massage-parlor sex. These are real people talking about real sex, and I think that's what will get to people like you and me. And I tried to remember after this book, had I ever imagined, or really thought, about my parents in bed together, and I'm you know, quote-unquote liberated, I'm a product of all the things that have gone on in the last couple of years. Well, I'll be damned, 'cause I haven't, you know? And I think that one thing we would say to young people is to say, look, you know, your parents did it. They had problems doing it, you had problems doing it."

But that's one of the very few things the Flemings are willing to say to young people, or to anybody. They assiduously avoid drawing conclusions or giving advice on the subject of sex. "I would not presume to tell anybody how to proceed about anything," says Anne. "If this will help somebody, terrific. But it's not a handbook." And Karl adds, "My expertise ends at raising chickens and growing tomatoes."

"I don't think we set out to prove any majestic point," Karl says. "We thought it was just a fascinating topic, told by fascinating people, that if each of these people told a true, vivid story, that inadvertently, accidentally, what they said might be some kind of commentary on who the hell we are. But we didn't set out with any noble purpose--it's not a sociological study."

"Because we're journalists," Anne interjects. "If you're a journalist what you do is hopefully peel back a few layers."

But at the same time that they deny any sociological pretensions, they are obviously concerned that the book be taken seriously as journalism. And they are pleased that, for the most part, the reviews have been neither flippant nor disparaging.

"In fact, the only publication which has not received it seriously is my old alma mater, Newsweek," Karl says a little huffily. The Newsweek review, which did not mention Fleming's former connection with the magazine, called the book "about as interesting--and titillating--as a protracted Merv Griffin show: 319 pages that manage to take most of the joy out of voyeurism."

"Karl, look," Anne gives her husband a soothing reproach. She seems to have heard this before. "If they give you a review that's two and a half columns, they take it seriously. Whether they disagree with you or not is another thing."

But Karl has shaken off his huffiness and is his old smooth self again. "Tell you the truth, I don't know how much we're affected by what critics say. We know who we are, and in the end that's really all that matters. I'm very proud of this book. I'm very proud, you know, to have done it."